This section was prompted
by Finch's description of the word 'useful' as English, (no.6). Using
audio recordings of Finch and other potters, we can look at Englishness
in relation to Finch's approach to pottery and his lifestyle as a country
potter.

English:
'The Hard and the Soft'
In the National Electronic and Video Archive of the Crafts, (NEVAC), the
potter William Newland is interviewed discussing what he perceives as
the dichotomy between the English and Europeans:

I
think it's a Germanic, Austrian hardness and I think in terms
of pottery it's the sort of Hans Coper compared say with
an early Leach slip bowl. I think it's in the English tradition
to be soft, I think it goes right back, even to the drover's
road. If you take the drover's road from Aberystwyth, where
they drove all the sheep to the London market: it softly winds
up the hill. And if the Germans had had to do it under Hitler,
they'd have built a bloody autobahn, jah 31

The Newland
interview includes several references to his idea that the Germans and
French are structured, hard and organised whilst the English are soft
and natural.32

It is perhaps no coincidence
that Hale interrupts Finch when he is explaining why 'useful' is a better
word than 'functional'. She suggests that useful is 'softer': the very
term Newland used when she interviewed him for NEVAC three months earlier.
Hale said functional and then when Finch corrected her, saying he prefers
'useful', she suggested it is a 'softer' word. The implication is that
functional is a 'hard' word. Hale has introduced the analogy of English
as soft and Europe as hard via an earlier interview with Newland. Finch's
and Hale's words then become inextricably linked with another interview
at another time, in another context

In his poem 'The Rolling English
Drunkard', G.K Chesterton is alluding to the sense that England is unplanned,
it has grown organically and continues to do so despite the Romans and
their roads and the rational orderliness of modern Europe. Finch was influenced
by Chesterton and his ally Eric Gill, and it seems throughout the interview
that Finch shared their sense of Englishness and the resonance their views
had in the early part of the twentieth century, as Modernism swept through
Europe. In their anti-industry attitude, discussed in detail in Martin
J.Weiner's book, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial
Spirit 1850-1980, they are championing a return to the land and manual
labour and away from the structured world of the machine.

The Rolling
English Roadby G.K.Chesterton

Before the
Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road,
a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no
harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,And
for to fight the Frenc hman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they
were forgiven him; or why do flowers run Behind him;
and the hedges all strengthening in the sun? The wild thing
went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the
ditch. God pardon us,
nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends,
we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

A further interview in the
archive, recorded in May 1994, reinforces the perception of England as
natural and Europe as ordered. The potter Sidney Tustin, (who worked at
Winchcombe Pottery for over fifty years with both Cardew and Finch), describes
why he preferred Cardew's English pots to the ones he made in Africa:

I
didn't like the pots he made in Africa. They were continental
to me. You know, when he was here he made the old English
shape - that is a belly, see that pot up there? He was making
that shape, but when he went over there they come with a nice
belly there and they went in a little bit and come down straight.
They'd got a broken line in, which I don't like ... It hadn't
got the flow somehow. It wasn't alive, it seemed to come nice
and then go dead.33

Tustin equates the flowing,
curving line of the full belly of Cardew's English slipware with the angular
lines of the stoneware pots he made in Africa. He calls that abruptness
or angularity, 'continental': a derogatory term in Tustin's language.
His final analogy is that the English pots were alive whilst the ones
he saw as continental were 'dead'.

Both Finch
and Tustin remained at Winchcombe throughout their working lives, making
pots in the Cardew tradition whilst Cardew worked in Africa and elsewhere.
Cardew himself wrote that his pots, 'are very rustic and very country,
the very antithesis of city pots it's a matter of the difference
of temperament between porcelain people and earthenware people ... at
heart I'm an earthenware potter.'34
Cardew, Finch and Tustin shared a common goal in making useful pots in
the English tradition and the language of all three shares a common sense
of England as natural - in opposition to the formality of the continent,
and by association, the city and the machine.

English:
The Lifestyle of the Country PotterFinch's sense of Englishness is determinedly rural.
Despite being brought up in London, he considers himself a countryman
and dislikes the town and urban life in general: 'I never go to London
now and I rarely go to Cheltenham.' His rural outlook, both physical and
philosophical, extends to the point where he feels 'the outside world
doesn't seem to penetrate too much in to the sort of thing we're doing.'
Asked about how he perceives the world, he replies, 'well, I don't really
take part in it very much you see.'35
This sense of detachment from the world is also evident in his work, for
which he tries to retain his anonymity.

Left
to right: Michael Cardew, Sidney Tustin and Ray Finch.Taken in 1977,
when Cardew called at Winchcombe to mark Tustinís 50 years
at the pottery.Photograph
courtesy of Sidney Tustin

Finch happily
reminisces about poaching with Sid Tustin,36
and bemoans the comparative violence and widespread nature of crime today.
His view of England is perfectly summed up in Alun Howkins description
of England's perceived rural image:

What
our rural image does is present us with a 'real England.' Here men and
women still live naturally. The air is clean, personal relationships
matter (especially between employer and employee), there is no crime
(except 'quaint' crime like poaching) and no violence It is an
organic society, a 'real' one, as opposed to the unnatural or 'unreal'
society of the town.37

Finch is
aware that he is harking back to the past, not least when he proclaims,
'Cheltenham has got so big now and noisy and so on. I'm speaking like
an old man aren't I?'38 Despite
this, his language throughout the interview is that of a man who considers
an organic, rural society as the 'real' one. Whilst having been interested
in the organic, back-to-the-land movement, he admits that it was an 'impossible
dream'.39 It is in his pride
at the success of Winchcombe Pottery, (which continues to make, 'a wide
range of hand-thrown stoneware pots for domestic use'), that one can see
the fulfillment of Finch's English pottery ideal.

I think we're back to,
you know, just to recap on the drover's road as opposed to the autobahn,
and I think if you take Europe: France is curious, it's sort of split,
there was Napoleon who loved geometry, yes? I think for artillery reasons
and gunnery. And if you go to France you get all these geometric gardens.
I don't know if you've seen any of them. Little box hedges and all measured
out and drawn. In England all our gardens, the chaps went on the Grand
Tour to Italy, and I think most of them looked at the paintings, and
the painter that they looked at in particular was Claude Lorrain, with
the sort of serpentine lake and the trees growing down the house at
the end of the garden as it were. And they came back and nearly all
the English gardens are sort of based on that, and you don't get, very,
very few, even things like the maze. If you look at a French maze it's
all cubsitic and the English one is all curved. So what I think is,
it's very well illustrated in gardens: even in northern Italy there's
a, just round the coast a bit there was a great English settlement then,
they made geometric gardens but they hide it all under an English rose
that sort of softens it all off. back
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